Give ‘Em Enough Rope Arrows: The Iphone’s Spider

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This is outside of our usual mandate, but fuck it. Tiger Style – who comprise of Ion Storm veterans Randy Smith (Lead on Thief: Deadly Shadows, co-designer of the Cradle, designer of Return to the Haunted Cathedral, that guy) and David Kalina (Thief: Deadly Shadows and – er – other malarkies) have released their first game for the Macintosh Individual Phone – or, Iphone. It’s called the Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor and is an adventurey-thing where you play a spider, bouncing around and making webs. And similar. Reviews so far are absolute fountains and it looks mechanically pretty novel. You can get it from here or watch the video below…

And while we’re talking arachnids, just to make this post even more off topic, here’s Phil Jupitus’ splendid stand-up routine about Spiders.

I got myself a shiny new iPhone 3GS (my first Apple product ever, go figure) just a week or so ago – in fact, a couple of my posts here have been made on it (it’s surprisingly easy to type properly on), so this is of great interest to me. It’s a nifty little omnigadget, and, as of the 3GS upgrade it’s hovering somewhere around the PSP in terms of raw graphical power, and far above it in terms of processor.

Continuing on this off-topic tangent, the two best things about the iPhone:

24/7 broadband internet in your pocket. I pull down about 230kb/s out in the street.

Games are VERY VERY CHEAP. The vast majority of the stuff I’ve gotten so far has been $1/59p, and we’re not talking cheap flash games here – there’s stuff like Siberian Strike, which is a high-budget 2.5d shooter in the style of 194X.

Also, I just got Spider. Played the first couple of training levels – the controls are REALLY sharp. The whole ‘point to move’ thing is clever and intuitive. It puts the emphasis of skill on the jumping around, rather than basic navigation.

And just for the hat trick, here’s something for iPhone owners to look forward to:

link to youtube.com
A 100% complete (well, excluding the editing suite, but nobody wants to even TRY to use that on a phone) port of PC/Linux/Mac gigantonormous fantasy-strategy game The Battle For Wesnoth. Yes, the user-content browser and download system is still in.

Yes. iPod touch and iPhone are equal devices, running the same OS. The only apps you might not be able to run are any which require any of the phone hardware (camera being the only one really appropriate for games).

I second the sub-blog for mobile gaming. Bring out the really obscure stuff so I don’t have to wade through the TouchArcade RSS all the time :)

Yeah, the touch can do most of what the phone can, but the latest touch is using the old internals, thus much slower than the 3Gs. There should be a new one coming out before long using the new architecture. (this post made from my iPhone – heh)

But the £390 pound price difference (over 18 months) between an ipod touch and an iphone 3G with an unlimited net connection is compelling if like me you wouldn’t use all those free minutes and stuff they give you. I love the look of all these iphone things but even the lowest £440 price for the 3GS is just stupidly expensive for me (I’ve got some mild telephobia so although I own a mobile I’ve been on the same £10 worth of PAYG credit for the past two years now) and I don’t want to spend £130 on an ipod touch when it’ll likely be obsolete fairly shortly. The game looks awesome but the platform is so darn expensive for a telephobe like me that I’ll have to give it a miss. If they release an ipod touch with the same specs as the 3GS at a sub £200 price I’d consider it but as it stands I’ll have to give the entire platform a miss.

The 3GS gets a lot cheaper with certain phone contracts. I got mine for around the £200 mark, but that’s with a two-year contract (unlimited internet, two hours of phone a month – but I’ve jailbroken it so I can use skype for voice calls – ha!). Wasn’t cheap, but I think I’ll be getting a good bit of use out of it these next two years.

@ Dominic White: Cheapest I’ve seen on a contract for the 3GS is £184.98 + £29.38 per month 18 month contract minimum = £713.82 so since I wouldn’t use all those free minutes and texts it looks cheaper to get a PAYG for £440 with 12 months free web access and maybe get the £10 a month web access after the first 12 months for a total of £500 after 18 months and £10 per month after that.

@kwyjibo – Given that amount of amazingly terrible sub-flash-game crap that gets onto the appstore, I’d describe it less as a gatekeeper, and more a heavily sloshed doorman at 3am. You may have to queue a bit, but there’s pretty much nothing stopping you from getting in.

And how does the PC being an open system make PC gaming great? It’s pretty much the cause of 99% of PC-gaming-related headaches.

It’s worth pointing out that the first-generation iPod Touch (identifiable by its lack of external volume buttons and no built-in speaker) is, I believe, the slowest of the lot; I can barely make it off the menu screen in Civ Rev on my 1G Touch.

Got a 3G the other day. Far as I can tell it does everything a 3GS does once you’ve updated to the 3.0 software (bar a few meaningless additions like a whole megapixel on the camera — for twice the price).

Best purchase in a long time. I’ve spent about a tenner on apps and games already – loving Field Runner and Monkey Island.

@Butler – the 3GS is a much, much more powerful piece of kit. Benchmarks so far estimate it as about four times as fast graphically as the 3G, and maybe twice as fast in terms of processor. I think it has twice as much RAM as well. It doesn’t have many more features than the 3G, but it’s roughly equivalent in power to a decent-spec laptop.

Oh, and just to blur the line between PC and iPhone a little further, and to pass the time before The Battle For Wesnoth is available, the iPhone port of Tyrian updated today, adding a new control method and some optimizations, and dropping the price down to that coveted 59p

It’s the full version of Tyrian (regular edition – it doesn’t have the T2000 fifth episode, sadly), and well worth getting. And yes, the Destruct minigame is present and correct.

“I want some good games for my Android phone damnit, ”
At least Popcap is still working on Peggle and Bejeweled. I send them an email a few weeks ago and asked.

Give the (still very young) mobile PC market some time. Most people who buy phones just pick the cheapest plan and then they pick a cheap phone. That is a 4.1 billion units market, compared to the few hundred million rich/trendy people who now own smartphones.

My guess is that in a few years most of these cheap pragmatic phones will be PCs running Android. Simply because it is the open standard that any manufacturer can and wants to put on his phone.

Under ‘PC’ I understand a general purpose, open computer system designed to allow software distribution without a regulating third party.

For what it’s worth, I’m really enjoying this. You can actually see some thief roots in that you’re exploring an old mansion and have free reign of each level as you plan the most efficient way to take your prize. That and the way secrets are handled as well. Oh, and taking down hornets is damn satisfying too.

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